The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Customer Communications Management Software just came out, and we’re extremely pleased to have been included in the “Other Vendors to Consider” section this year. Though we do not meet all of the criteria for inclusion on the Magic Quadrant itself (for example, we currently serve the US and Canada), the Gartner analysts found us worthy of recognition as a possible best choice for some customers. We are honored to be among just ten mentioned in this section of the report.

The Temkin Group recently released its annual list of customer experience trends and labeled 2017 “The Year of Purpose.” For reference, Temkin dubbed last year the Year of Emotion and 2015 the Year of Employees. They strongly feel that 2017 will require companies to focus heavily on purpose.

With the explosion of marketing technologies (martech) in recent years and more and more of the responsibility for customer experience (CX) management falling under the marketing umbrella, marketing leaders find themselves increasingly involved in the technology purchasing process. Some CMOs are working more closely with CTOs and CIOs. Others are morphing into CMTOs (chief marketing technology officers) because tech has become such a central piece of modern enterprise marketing. For this reason, understanding how customer experience delivery software is designed and deployed is going to be a pretty big deal moving forward. It’s not just IT leaders’ responsibility anymore.

We’ve been going over Gartner’s recent report, Three Steps to Enrich the Customer Experience with Contextualized Communications, for the past couple of weeks. We have been digging into the ideas they covered a bit more deeply in a series of posts here on our blog. You can read Challenge 1: A Fragmented Approach, Challenge 2: Static Output, Unidirectional Broadcast Model, and Challenge 3: Not Knowing Your Customers first if you like. In this post, we dive into the first solution Gartner recommends.

What do you think of when you hear the term “customer communications management”? Most people think of letters, statements, privacy notices, and other documents and correspondence that traditionally have been produced in large batches and mailed to customers en masse. Many people now include digital versions of those communications in their understanding of CCM, too. And some are seeing the expansion of traditional customer communications across any and all channels, throughout the customer journey, and into the broader customer experience.

The biggest obstacle to delivering consistent customer experiences at every touchpoint throughout the customer journey is silos. Within many, if not most, large businesses, there are thick metaphorical walls between departments, lines of business, campuses, etc. And the separation affects everything, including people, processes and technology – and, in turn, it affects the customers.